“In my experience, those who are most ambivalent or cynical about patriotic pieties—flags, fireworks, and fun—are most likely to support the abuses of statist power when the state is attempting to become some jitney god in the lives of the citizens. But those who wave the flag at the parade and eat their hot dogs …
Prophetic Proportions
[No sense of proportion] “is why so much of the contemporary ‘prophetic’ witness to our civil rulers is such a joke. It is not so much dressed in camel hair with a leather belt as it is decked out in some Kuba the Clown outfit. And then it blames the lack of responsiveness on hardness …
A Big Sheet
“Christians who feel guilt over their decisions of what to eat need to go to sleep on the roof, like Peter did, so that they might see the entire inventory of General Mills lowered in a sheet from heaven” (Food Catholic, pp. 29-30).
False Moral Equivalence
“If He does not lose a sense of proportion in the Day of Judgment, then His representatives must no ‘get to preaching’ in such a way as to get carried away. And they must not get to denouncing sins in such a way as to create a moral equivalence between excessive consumerism on display at …
Dietary Sanctification
“There is a kind of mind that flips this around, and wants the heart to be established by food—wants to be in with God by means of what is put into the mouth” (Food Catholic, p. 27).
The Confusion Begins Early
“But this moral inversion is not something that can be achieved in a day. Before you reverse good and evil, you must flatten good and evil, and before you flatten good and evil, you must flatten greater evil and lesser evil and greater good and lesser good. Moral egalitarianism is a rot that proceeds slowly. …
Posing as Peasants
“One of the saddest features (or funniest, depending) of contemporary food snobbery is the notion that rich people are getting in touch with the rhythms of the earth when they shop at the Whole Foods market. Paying three times as much for a really good apple is a fine thing to do, so long as …
Before Lawless Thrones
“The point here is that the biblical Christian has a natural point of appeal above every human institution—whether than institution be popular elections, that fortress of fraud we call the Congress, the faux-imperial White House, or the black-robed SCOTUS Nazgul who ghoulishly prey on the unborn. One of them singly, or all of them together, …
Free From
“We should pursue the ideal of good cooking and good food the same way—free from guilt, free from snobbery, free from lies about cooties in the food” (Food Catholic, p. 20).
Which Is Why We Were Warned
“You cannot build your house in a left wing swamp or on a pile of right wing sand and then, when troubles arise, as they surely will, whistle up the foundation you wish you might have had. You either have a foundation when you need it, or you don’t” (Empires of Dirt, pp. 22-23).